Plus: A very nicely made unit, clear display, sensitive touchscreen.

Minus; A nightmare to program. There needs to be a LOT more in-depth notes on the process of building an app on the Kinoma webpage. Their examples are interesting, but the paradigm used isn't well explained at all. It would be great if, instead of abstracting the hardware to the point of total obscurity, it was better explained.

You might be at "hello world" in a few minutes if you copy their example - but that's not writing you own code.

I'll probably be able to use it eventually, but the learning curve is very steep for this old-school programmer.

The product looks interesting but the initiation is brutal. There is a complete lack of step by step orientation to what they call the "Kinoma Platform Runtime". It makes you feel like you are learning programming for the first time but have lost the manual ! There is a hello world app but it is about 40 lines of obscure code. This is in complete contrast with the sleekness of the device, website and IDE.

This device is pretty cool. Out of the box got it running on my network quickly. There was an update and that went smoothly. The GUI based apps for setup and viewing samples are way easier than hooking it up to my laptop and learning the config commands.

A friend brought over a pulse sensor and we got it running immediately using the Pin Explorer app. That alone was pretty great. We found a sample app that uses the pulse sensor which was cool. I think I am going to turn into a sensor junkie.

Still trying to figure out the Studio programming app but the way it launches the app you are working on to the device over wi-fi is great.

Next up trying to do something more complicated, but I see a bunch of samples to start from so hopefully that should be straight forward.

This device is a good tool for all manner of development, but it really shines at rapid prototyping and interacting with the user. The onboard touchscreen is easy to use, and provides for niceties like instant feedback from sensors (before writing any code) using an onboard utility.

Onboard WiFi means one less wire to worry about and the Javascript framework includes complete HTTP and Websocket stacks to communicate with a wide variety of internet resources.

As mentioned in an earlier review, this JS framework abstracts away the hardware interaction a bit. That’s true, but I’ve not found that to be a limitation. If I need to write raw data to i2c or serial, I can do that with a single JS function call. Same with reading from A2D or flipping GPIOs - it is abstracted, but not limited.

The “Getting Started” docs on Kinoma’s site are still evolving, but between over 80 sample apps and a really helpful forum staffed by the guys who built the device, I have never been stuck on anything for very long.

Finally, the software platform is a full-up Javascript engine, which means that porting over powerful Javascript libraries written for other systems can be very fast.

It wouldn't boot up. Just showed a garbled display. Disappointed because one of ou developers was really excited about the possibilities. Returned it and decided to let it mature before we try again.